Thursday 23 December 2021

Post No. 2,113 - reflections on end-of-year reflections

The company I work at for my day job is having their end of year reflections / announcements, and they have been pretty much as expected - the difficulty of working under pandemic conditions (although what was not acknowledged was that the difficult was worse for those not comfortable with online communications rather than face--to-face - which more of a problem for extraverts than introverts), and ho much growth we'd made and how big the company was. 

I have to admit there were times when I was pleased to be able to get a big project "under my belt" / "on my CV", but those times are a couple of decades ago now, and I have never lost my enjoyment of being able to use my skills to help the smaller clients who often struggle because no-one cares or even thinks about them - the retirement village that is overwhelmed by having to deal with having an on-site wastewater treatment plant because they are outside any water authority's area but are subject to new environmental regulations, the landfill operator who wants to produce an extremely high quality of treated water but doesn't realise how expensive and difficult that it, or the small business who wants to do an environmentally sound expansion. 

We're not a charity, so I am expected to make a profit or at least not make a loss, but my manager helps me do as much as I can for these people - especially people like the retirement village (and I quite like the charitable organisation we have - I raised the issue of sending aid to the Philippines, where we have quite a few staff, following the recent typhoon and they were already onto that). 

But, in many key ways, the company's thinking reflects that of much of society - the "bigger is better" misconception. 

Unfortunately, this sort of "thinking" (it's really more of attitude, given the lack of awareness - especially around how much of this is unevaluated absorption from parents/key figures) is responsible (at least partly, and often to a significant degree) for many problems - including: 

  • empires ("our city/nation/empire/religion must be bigger than theirs to ensure we survive" * , or "we must have more land to live in" * ); 
  • the Industrial Revolution ("we can make more things than doing the old way" * ); 
  • addiction to economic growth ("all living things grow, so the economy thing should as well" * ); 
  • this; and 
  • population growth ("our city/nation/empire/religion must be bigger than theirs to ensure we survive" * ).

The problems are not just the direct problems, there are flow-on problems as well - such as the suicides caused by the "space race", the paranoia and loss of transparency caused by the Cold War's arms competition ("we must have more nukes than them" * ), and the classism, fear of crime, and mistaken view that houses are a way to accumulate wealth rather than live securely that goes with wanting bigger houses and other material possessions. 

The one I have been thinking of particularly is population growth, which is commented on in some of the books I've been reading of late *** .

I've long had concerns about population growth, which causes problems such as: 

  • clearing land (none of the advocates for allowing population growth that I've spoken to have made the connection that when you have more people, you need places for them to live, and that causes clearing and other environmental problems that these same people often object to); 
  • environmental impacts (as well as finding places for them to live, you also need to feed them [historically, that need has also contributed to problems such as "slash-and-burn agriculture"]) which are far worse for those people living industrialised lives (and those raising this as a justification for allowing population growth never cut back their lives to the levels of environmental impact that they consider acceptable); and 
  • overcrowding (which is rarely acknowledged as an issue by extraverts, people with no lived experience of [or even exposure to] discrimination against minorities, and people with an unacknowledged and unmanaged fear of being alone).

That last issue gets into the biggest problem here: our species' history of being genocidal ** . That deplorable, appalling history makes talking about population growth as a problem almost impossible - and yet, in terms of managing our impact on the planet and leaving it survivable, it is crucial to do so.

There are some encouraging signs. such as the decline in birth rates in a South American nation when characters on a soap opera decided to limit themselves to two children, but there are also examples of what doesn't work (such as China's one child policy, which was responsible for corruption and human rights abuses [see here, here, and here]) - and then there is the ever-present problem of so many people in the economics field advocating for growth. (Ironically, if we get away from our devastating addiction to economic growth, we are going to have to live with balanced budgets and no deficits - one of the main reasons people seem to be sanguine about debt now is that the debt becomes insignificant when measured against the size of a future, bigger economy . . . which will no longer happen under the scenario just mentioned.)

What is the solution? How do we talk about and avoid human rights abuses? 

I don't know. 

What I DO know, is that population growth and overpopulation are problems that we are not properly acknowledging or considering - and that failure to do so could be part of the killing us.


 * this is an example of the sort of stupid "bigger is better" attitudes mis-described as thinking that I despise. 

 ** see, from https://gnwmythrsglossary.blogspot.com/2021/12/human-rights.html: 

 *** In particular, in Elena  Danaan's sci-fi novel "Resilience: Beyond the Impossible" 


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